YOSHINORI is a gourmet restaurant located in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés just a stone’s throw away from Odéon.
The space consists of two floors, a ground floor and a basement. It is characteristic of the neighborhood in which it is located and has a stone and wooden structure, visible wooden beams on the ground floor, and vaulted stone cellars in the basement.
Yoshinori Morie is a Japanese chef who makes gourmet French cuisine while bringing to his dishes a balance of flavors, presentation, and technique that are very characteristic of his background.
Our vision was to interpret this cultural blending in the conception of the restaurant without proposing a Japanese-inspired space.
We researched an element specific to the Japanese aesthetic culture: the art of wooden screen panels.
This traditional Japanese handiwork is based on the repetition of a triangular pattern in which motifs are sometimes inserted, which also communicate meanings and wishes.
We then made this pattern the central theme of the restaurant’s interior design: it appears on the walls of the ground floor, it becomes transparent in the stairway railing, and it changes scale and shape transforming itself into a diamond motif for the openwork screens and the glasswork of the semi-open kitchen.
The screens are given a modern update thanks to digital cutting on lightly bleached MDF oak-plated panels.
All of the openwork screens, such as the railing and the glasswork in the kitchen and basement, have been inserted into a steel structure that we opted to oxidize in order to highlight the raw material, which contrasts with the wood’s lacelike quality, another allusion to Yoshinori’s cuisine.
